How I Built a Multi-Level Approval Process (L1, L2, L3) with Locking, Emails, and Escalation — A Developer’s Story

ProcessInstance, ProcessWorkItem, auto field updates, and the day I learned why escalation rules save careers. We had a purchase request system. It looked fine on the surface — users could submit requests, data was stored, reports existed. But there was one massive problem: There was no approval sys